General Hospital: The Planet’s Most Addictive Soap Opera, Starring Billions Without Health Insurance

Port-au-Prince, Kigali, and a dimly lit soundstage in Burbank have more in common than you might think. Each, in its own melodramatic way, hosts a “general hospital,” that universal theatre where birth certificates, death notices, and insurance forms tango under flickering fluorescent lights. From the cholera wards of Kinshasa to the for-profit palaces along Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road, the same plotlines unfold: IV bags drip like slow-release hope, administrators juggle currencies and cadavers, and patients discover that the bill is the only thing certain to outlive them.

Consider the numbers—grim little haikus of modernity. The World Health Organization estimates that 400 million people lack access to “essential health services,” a euphemism that sounds like a spa package but translates to “no antibiotics for your kid’s pneumonia.” Meanwhile, back in the United States, the land where General Hospital has aired for six decades, medical debt outstrips credit-card debt, proving that even soap-opera writers lack the imagination to script American billing departments. One nation’s cliff-hanger is another’s daily ward round.

Cross the Mediterranean and the drama flips genres. In Greece, hospitals ran out of surgical gloves during the debt crisis; enterprising staff bought them on eBay and mailed the receipts to Brussels like ransom notes. In India, a single public hospital in Mumbai once delivered 18,000 babies in 12 months—roughly one newborn every 20 minutes—turning obstetrics into a conveyor belt of joy and post-partum hemorrhage. The global moral? If you’re going to be born, pick your coordinates carefully; the stork is subcontracted these days.

The pandemic, that overzealous show-runner, recently bumped every general hospital to primetime. From Bergamo to Bangkok, corridors became catwalks for PPE chic. Italian nurses reused masks until the elastic snapped, while Singaporean robots patrolled wards bleating “please maintain social distance” in four languages, including the universal tongue of existential dread. In Ecuador, corpses lay in the street like spoilers no one asked for; in New Zealand, hospitals remained so empty that TikTok dances broke out in ICU break rooms. Same virus, wildly different ratings.

Yet the true international constant is paperwork. Whether you’re wheeled into a field tent run by Médecins Sans Frontières or a marble lobby scented with lemongrass diffusers, someone will demand your mother’s maiden name and the name of your first pet—ostensibly for “security questions,” though it feels more like an audition for the afterlife. The clipboard is mightier than the scalpel; it decides if you’re worth a CT scan or a consolatory pat on the shoulder.

Technology, the promised deus ex machina, has merely layered new ironies onto ancient miseries. Rwanda’s drones deliver blood bags to remote clinics faster than Manhattan ambulances can cross Midtown traffic—a neat reversal of colonial logistics. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, start-ups sell AI that predicts sepsis six hours early but neglects to mention the algorithm was trained on patients who could pay premium Wi-Fi fees. The machines learn quickly; compassion still buffers.

And so the wheel turns. A British tourist collapses in a Croatian general hospital, discovers the bill is lower than his London parking ticket, and promptly tweets a revolution. A Congolese surgeon performs brain surgery by the glow of a smartphone because the generator died—again. Somewhere in the metaverse, a virtual hospital offers NFT bandages, each one algorithmically unique and functionally useless. The punch line writes itself, but the patients aren’t laughing; they’re too busy breathing, or trying to.

In the end, every general hospital is a sovereign nation with its own flag: a white sheet that may or may not cover the body beneath it. The borders are porous—germs and guilt travel passport-free—but the customs line stretches forever. We arrive with different currencies of pain and leave with the same stamped discharge papers: “Follow up in two weeks, if still alive.” The world shrinks to a single fluorescent corridor where the only universal right is the right to wait. Curtain.